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A look back on our 90th anniversary celebrations

A look back on our 90th anniversary celebrations

With the ink freshly dried on the final pages of the first edition
of the Oxford English Dictionary, an
extraordinary mission begun over 60 years prior to compile a comprehensive
record of the English language, the edition’s co-chief editor Charles Onions
hailed 1928 as ‘the Year of
the Dictionary’.

Ninety years on, we have celebrated this colossal
achievement of the edition’s many contributors with many wonderful contributions
from our own editors, ambassadors, and the general public – both to the
festivities and the dictionary itself.

In this blog post, we’d like to share just a few of our
favourite moments from the festivities of the past 12 months…

In true OED
fashion, we kicked off the celebrations with a call for more words – and people
all over the world answered! The first of four OED Appeals, Words Where You Are,
sought to identify and record the words, phrases, and expressions particular to
a town, city, region, or even country that are second nature to its inhabitants
but may be baffling to visitors.

We have already published entries for several of the
suggestions from this appeal and our editors shared a look at their work on hammajang, a Hawaiian regionalism meaning ‘in a disorderly or
shambolic state’, and munted a New Zealand word meaning
‘ruined, spoiled, damaged’ that was adopted by the UK rave scene of the 1990s,
in this appeal
update post.

Our next appeal, Hobby Words, sought to gather the words and phrases used by people when talking about a shared hobby or pastime that, again, tend to be little-known to outsiders. We received hundreds of submissions concerning hobbies as varied as bell ringing and scuba diving, quilting and amateur radio, and in this blog post we take a look at everything from UFOs to DXing.

Our two most recent appeals, Youth Words and Words at Work, sought words used by children and young people and words only heard in workplaces, respectively. Our editors are investigating this latest crop, with the likes of ‘boop’, ‘peng’, and ‘WOAT’ contributed by young people (and bemused parents) and ‘bork’, ‘bandwidth’, and ‘apple box’ as heard in workplaces, among those en route to OED inclusion.

How do new words suggestions like
these become part of the dictionary? You can follow the journey of OMG from its invention (in a letter to
Sir Winston Churchill!) to its inclusion in the OED through our new interactive
feature to find out what happens to your new word submissions!

Along with this host of words, we have had contributions from our brilliant OED ambassadors – including a decade-by-decade exploration of the past 90 years in words from John Ayto, musings on the ‘counter-language’ of slang with Jonathon Green, and a celebration of the ‘fruitful transatlantic partnership’ that is the OED from Ben Zimmer.

Walking Word by Word, by Stan Carey

Writer Stan
Carey created the spine poem ‘Walking Word by Word’ to mark the occasion,
dedicating it to Sir James Murray, the editor who led the first edition’s
editorial staff for much of its creation. Fellow poet – and a former OED editor herself – Jane
Griffiths gave a reading of her poem ‘nature, n.1’, inspired by her work
editing the OED entry for nature, while poet Ian
McMillan mused on the localisms of his South Yorkshire hometown in a piece
for our Words
Where You Are appeal.

We spoke with the Man Booker-shortlisted author Daisy Johnson who visited our Oxford HQ for a tour and a chat about her debut novel Everything Under, an eerie retelling of the Oedipus myth whose main character works as a lexicographer on our very own OED. And we were delighted to meet Desmond Morris, the world-renowned zoologist and author of The Naked Ape, in his home in North Oxford to discuss his many connections to the OED – one being his home itself, which was also formerly home to Sir James Murray and his family and was the site of the first edition’s famous scriptorium.

The plaque which marks the spot of the former scriptorium

YA and children’s fiction author Frances
Hardinge shared her five favourite words, while Geraldine
McCaughrean talked to us about the delights – and necessity – of unusual
words in children’s fiction. And the OED
can now be counted among the lucky number of books illustrated by the much-loved
children’s fiction illustrator Nick Sharratt,
who created a lovely birthday OED
illustration and a drawing of his own favourite word – pumpkin! – for us.

And speaking of favourite words and foodstuffs, Kate Young, author of The Little Library Cookbook of literature-inspired recipes, was inspired to bake ‘formerly’ and ‘subsequently’ cheesecakes based on the OED’s etymology for cheesecake. You can find the two recipes – along with mouth-watering photos – in this blog post.

You can find all this and more (ever wondered how the OED uses Twitter as a research tool?) from our celebrations on the OED blog. Thank you for joining us in wishing the OED a very happy 90th birthday!

The opinions and other information contained in the OED blog posts and comments do
not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press.

It was the decade of all things cyber-: cybercrime, cybersex, cybershoppers, cyberwar. The main fear in the cybercafé was the dreaded millennium bug, which threatened to make the world’s computer systems crash when the clocks chimed midnight on 31 December 1999.